Today's "the day after". The day after Apple started a patent war with HTC and Google. Today, we have statements from both HTC and Google, and a number of other people have weighed in as well as to the possible ramifications of Apple's lawsuit.

I can't see how this will end well for Apple. Many of their patents seem like they should be thrown away for being obvious and the rest seem like there is plenty of prior art. I'm sure Google and HTC will wave their patents in the air as well and this mess will be settled out of court, leaving the lawyers as the only winners.

The problem is, if you look at any old patent cases a lot of times you'd find tons of prior art. But the defendants almost never use that, because it's actually very difficult to get the patents invalidated, but also because they also have lots of patents that have prior art. They just don't want to draw attention to the fact that a lot of their patents are bulls**t. The more patents you have the higher your stock price, if people suddenly found out most of these patents are nil, your stock price drops.

In addition to that, this case is leaving a bad taste in many mouths. I have been starting to move away from Apple products and this recent move of theirs just guaranteed that I will never buy any of their products again. Apple, you've just joined Sony and Microsoft (at least MS software) on my boycott list.